Quick Tip: Upgrading Drupal from 6.x to 6.y

Senior Developer

I recently received this inquiry from one of my Drupal workshop attendees and thought it might be helpful to some folks. Many of you have still not made the leap to Drupal 7 and might be looking to simply upgrade within different versions of Drupal 6. Here are some quick instructions to make life easier for you. (I actually found that this information is not that easy to find from a Google search. I will also be posting this on Drupal.org).

On your browser, log in as admin and put site in maintenance mode.

Create a backup of your database.

Create a backup of your DRUPAL_ROOT (Drupal root directory - the directory where sites, modules, themes, update.php etc lives.)Note: you may need to double check if .htaccess was backed up, sometimes it has special settings.

Download and uncompress the Drupal 6.y version that you want to upgrade to in a location different than the DRUPAL_ROOT.